Question
Write 2 FULL page DOUBLE spaced (font size 11) in response to the Eye of the Storm Jane Elliot Eye Color Exercise. Talk about the exercise with the kids, adults, and then write your reactions/response. Add text information that applies to this and Sociology for your citations, as well as the film.
1. Use the text as a reference to some term/concepts that relate
2. Use the film as a resource as well.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/class-divided/
Solution
The Blue-Eyes and Brown-Eyes Experiment
Jane Elliott, a worldwide famous schoolteacher, educator and antiracism activist applied the minimal group paradigm to carry out an experiment to educate her learners about discrimination. This happened soon after the assassination of Martin Luther King which was a big shock to Jane Elliott and the entire nation. The experiment was aimed at showing students that a randomly established disparity could divide them and encourage hatred towards each other. The minimal group paradigm used by Elliot has ever since been applied in social psychology methodologies and it is through the establishment of differences between subjects that enables an individual to split them into distinct groups. As Elliot’s exercise played a vital role in the development of social psychology, this essay will focus on the happenings of the experiment as and its consequences
Elliott divides the students according to their eye color as presented in the video then does the exercise with her students in their classroom which indicates that people who have brown eyes are better than those whose eyes are blue in color. She further tells students with brown eyes to fasten construction paper armbands on students with blue eyes. Both basic and subjective examples have been used to stress that students with brown eyes are better although this surprises the students, they do not argue much which enables her to successfully create the two groups. Students with brown eyes are the majority in the room and hence they feel superior since they have support from their teacher. They also apply power over students with blue eyes after they introduce armbands on them. While the students with blue eyes, on the other hand, are smaller in number, Elliot argues that they are less clean and intelligent (Blue-Eyes / Brown-Eyes: An Exercise in Racism). Despite being the minimal group, the authority is against them and as a result they feel much discriminated.
The outcome of the minimal group of students displays the evidence of discrimination immediately. For example, a minor difference such as eye color identified and established by someone in the authority figure causes a division between students where children with brown eyes begin to behave in a mean and aggressive manner towards the other group. Over the course of this exercise, division between the two groups is intensified to an extent of physical violence among children (Elliott 108). They argue, hate each other and sometimes fight due to the differences in eye color. The next day, Elliot gets the same results after reversing the group and telling the children that those who have brown eyes are inferior.
The video also features how Elliott goes ahead to conduct the same exercise on adult group through a workshop performed in Britain. As displayed in the video, she divides the participants depending with the eye color where employees with brown eyes enjoy majority status as those with blue eyes are isolated, treated cruelly and are under surveillance (Blue-Eyes / Brown-Eyes: An Exercise in Racism). The main aim of this exercise is to replicate the chauvinistic apartheid regime in which the adults’ responses to the brown-eye, blue-eye exercise are the same as those displayed by the students.
Personal Response
Elliott’s exercise is a true representation of those social groups that discriminate against each other due to culture, religion or ethnicity. Such differences promote hate and war among people especially if they are caused by those in authority. From the video, we see a child from blue-eyes group who explains what it feels to be discriminated against such as the feeling of quitting the school reveals the pain this child was going through. Elliott’s paradigm helps modern societies to understand problems associated with discrimination. An increase in migration opens opportunities for people from different social backgrounds to interact with each other and encourage conflict. People who are already established in a given place would always feel intimidated by new immigrants and as a result they create divisions of superiority and inferiority which leads to racial discrimination and sometimes to terrorism. Therefore, encouraging a discrimination free society helps people appreciate each other as the children feels good about each other at the end of the exercise.
Work Cited
Elliott, Jane. A Collar in My Pocket: The Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Exercise. CreateSpace Independent, 2016. Print.
Elliott, Jane. “Blue-Eyes / Brown-Eyes: An Exercise in Racism.” You Tube, September 22, 2014, www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/class-divided.
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